


Withering

by AgapantoBlu



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Shiori is a strong person and nobody can convince me otherwise, and a lot of sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 19:50:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7282321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He freezes. She doesn’t even jerk as the words break a wall he didn’t even want to get close to.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>She smiles, and it’s not one of those fake empty smiles she’s been mastering in the past years but he almost wishes he could have them back because that broken melancholic version of the brightest light he had ever seen is creeping into his soul, opening cracks too deep to close.</i>
</p><p><i>"</i>Used to<i>?" she repeats [...].</i></p><p>***</p><p>He didn't mean for that to happen, but she broke anyway and everything crumbled down for good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Withering

**_Withering_ **

 

The tingling crash of porcelain against the marble floor echoes in the dining room, as expected from such a big waste of space, but that is about all. When the echo subdues, only a single panting breath fills the void, caressing the mahogany long table and the stern portraits hanging from the walls. Centuries of ancestors’ dead eyes don’t blink at the disaster on the floor, but so don’t the pair of red irises he is so desperate to gauge a reaction out of.

The man would be tall, but he’s hunched forward, his palms flat against the table and his head dangling forward, dark hair covering just as dark eyes. His shoulders are tense and stiff, his suit slightly wrinkled and his black shoes now show a little stain of soy sauce. He doesn’t care, for once. Perfection can wait.

“I cannot-…” He stops, unable to say what he doesn’t know yet. He can’t what? He has no idea. Or maybe he does, but he’s not ready to face it yet.

She’s quiet, awfully so. She sits at her place at the end of the table, opposite to him, so far he could barely make out her features when he was sitting too, and she doesn’t move. She stares at the plate in front of her, still full of whatever great dish their chef prepared, and seems like she hasn’t even realized her cutlery and her glass and her cup of rice are now smashed on the floor. She’s still perfect, hair combed in a tress and hanging on one of her shoulders and hands folded on her lap, her white dress clean and without a crease. She’s not looking at him and it’s making him go crazy.

When she speaks, she’s quiet and gentle like an angel afraid of bothering, the most suave of the sounds he doesn’t want to hear.

“I apologize if I offended you in any way.” His hands clench into fists against the wooden surface and finally she lifts her chin a bit, but still she wouldn’t look at his face, “I-…”

“Stop it!” He’s almost screaming even if he doesn’t want to; he’s almost crying even if it has been more than twenty years since the last time. He knows what he cannot, now: he cannot deal with  _this_. “Stop talking like that, stop acting like that, stop being like that!” He cannot deal with this new side of her and he’s screaming for real now. “Stop acting like the shadow of the woman I used to love!”

He freezes. She doesn’t even jerk as the words break a wall he didn’t even want to get close to. 

She smiles, and it’s not one of those fake empty smiles she’s been mastering in the past years but he almost wishes he could have them back because that broken melancholic version of the brightest light he had ever seen is creeping into his soul, opening cracks too deep to close.

“ _Used to_?” she repeats, so much sadness in her voice. He didn’t mean to say that, he doesn’t think that. If it was real, he wouldn’t be trembling at her side, in their dining room, alone in a house full of servants pretending not to see.

“No.” He sits on his heels because his legs are trembling for the fear of having overstepped one boundary too many, but she still doesn’t move, doesn’t even look at him, only at her dish. He cannot bring himself to ask for her attention because he’s not sure he can face those eyes now that he can see them shining in unshed tears even from the side. “I just…” He bites his tongue, thinks, bends his head just for a second as he recollects his thoughts, before finally lifting it again and searching for her face. So soft her skin, her features, her irises, used to be when they first met; but now there’s some kind of sharpness in them, a tired paleness and a wax mask shying her away once more. He cannot hold himself back as he asked: “Why did you have to change?”

They were happy. They could have make it work, make it through. But she went and changed and he had found himself with this empty shell he cannot stop loving but cannot feel as strongly for as before.

She turns, for the first time, and he crumbles too under the most loving desperate smile he has ever seen, under a pair of irises and two lines of falling tears and under the sight of a shattered will. He used to think she was unbreakable, but now he knows he had miscalculated. He had miscalculated  _badly_.

He clenches his teeth when her voice comes with her slightly tilted head and a factual voice that clashes with her distraught appearance.

“Because you needed me to.”

He refuses, denies, rejects. He didn’t.

“I need you the way you used to be.” He’s not shouting anymore, but he knows he’s crying too. Not like her, not so much, but he feels a single drop climbing down his cheek, to his jaw, and he knows it’s the most he can give right now. He’s given enough through the years already. “I need you to… hum songs while walking in the corridors and… changing the flowers dispositions in the rooms so that their petals don’t match with the walls. I need you to walk out in the garden bare-feet and to wear…stupid ugly sweatpants to play basketball alone behind the stables and… to laugh too loud and to…drink beer when your parents don’t see you and to sing out loud all those terrible foreigner songs and to… to…”  _To be you, to be you, to be you and not what they wanted you to be._

He lowers his head to hide the way he’s biting his lower lip. He’s always scrunched his nose at every single one of the things he has said while his father complained about her attitude, but in secret he had been striving not to laugh at her, not to join her and ‘flip the bird’, as she taught him, to their parents. All those things, he would usually withhold for their secret meetings at the street basket court near their schools, where nobody would have seen, where she would try to teach him how to play and he would be far too good for a starter.

“I need  _you_.” he finishes and he’s lame and sad and pathetic, but he’s also honest as he hasn’t been in so long.

When he feels the hand laying on the crown of his head, for a moment he believes he’s reached her.

“You know I don’t have all that time anymore.”

His heart breaks once and for all as she get up and leaves, silently caressing her swollen belly.

***

She wasn’t how she used to be, but she was still strong. She hung on for more than twice the time the doctors had predicted for her, but there was just so much she could do.

He stares at her picture on the coffin, the gentle smile from when she was a lady - barely a copy of the brightness it held when she was twenty and free - presenting itself to the world that had never really known her, fluctuating in a see of white flowers.

“Father-…” 

“Silence.” He cannot bear the thought that even his son has never known the real essence of his mother, the powerful girl she was before choosing to wither herself to appease people, to make it easier for her husband, to become what she had been expected to be her whole life. What she used to swear she would never be as she slammed the orange ball into the basket, sweat on her forehead and thin calluses on her hands. “You’re disturbing the function, Seijuro.”

 _You’ve been dead for so much longer than this._ , he thought, _Shiori._  

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve always thought it was so “out of place” the idea of Shiori offering her son a basketball. I mean, why?, why that, why not something else? Then “what if she played it?, what if she loved it as much as her son?” came around. And inevitably I wondered “But then what about it when she got married into such a stern family as the Akashi household?”.
> 
> And this happened.
> 
> So, head canon that Masaomi met Shiori before they were engaged, finding her playing basket while her very traditional family thought she was studying piano or something like that, happy and free and a bit of a rebel filled with dreams about defying her family that halted when she fell in love exactly with the man she gets engaged to one day. In the end, Shiori made her choice and gave up all her dreams to stand at his husband’s side, especially after discovering of the illness (that I head canon had been slow in taking her away). She tried to give her son the same thing that used to make her feel alive before she chose to annihilate herself for the sake of her family’s reputation, to stand beside her husband without embarrassing him and to prepare a good future for her son. 
> 
> I’m crying, Shiori is one of my favorite characters and we basically knew nothing of her!
> 
> Also, I'm sorry.
> 
> [My Tumblr](http://agapantoblu.tumblr.com) if you want to scream at me.


End file.
